Mike Schroepfer and Michael Abrash Talk Future of VR at Facebook

Day one of the F8 Developer Conference brought the announcement that Facebook would begin supporting spherical video in their network’s newsfeed and in Oculus, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Today in a keynote with Mike Schroepfer, CTO of Facebook, who has been with Facebook since 2008, showed off a demo of EVE Valkyrie and announced that we “are going to be able to do this, this year in VR and you’re going to be doing it in Oculus”

We are going to build technology that brings the world together

Welcome To The Rabbit Hole

In a second virtual reality keynote following Schroepher’s keynote, Michael Abrash, chief scientist at Facebook-owned Oculus, who joined Oculus almost exactly one year ago, took the stage and showed off his passion for VR.

It was the the Matrix made me believe in VR and how some day how real it could be and how exciting it could be to bend and stretch that reality

Michael Abrash took us down a rabbit hole indeed. A long drawn out talk about perception, visual illusions on screen, and even having attendees take out tiny paper tables to compare sizing from their packets. “VR today is good enough to create experiences, but just barely. So many ways for it to get much much better” including haptics, visuals, audio, and tracking.

According to Abrash, VR will win in the end because of the fact that this technology is already compelling and shipping soon, there is broad industry participation, a long term commitment, and a march of new technology.

It’s clear that VR has the potential to change almost everything about the way we live

When Micahel Abrash first joined Oculus he posted that “Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus means that VR is going to happen in all its glory.” From the looks of things, we may be getting closer, but not close enough apparently for all of us who were waiting for a consumer Oculus release date.